The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Time and Space Warps refer to strange perturbations of time and space. In these, a person might be inexplicably transplanted from one temporal era or a position in space to another. Frequently these serve more as plot devices to transport the protagonist(s) from one place to another.
Adaptation of the popular Young Adult series about a twelve-year-old super-villain and his adventures with assorted magical creatures. Audiences hated this but I though it overspilled with a madcap creativity
When Guillermo Del Toro made Pacific Rim, The Asylum conducted their own copy simply by switching US seaboards. While not exactly Oscar quality, this is one of The Asylum’s better mockbusters
B budget film from Edgar G. Ulmer that was made quickly to exploit the success of George Pal’s The Time Machine concerning an Air Force pilot who is thrown through time into a mutant ruled future
Biggles, Captain W.E. Johns’ famous flying ace, appeared in a long-running series of boys books. In his big screen film outing. he has the ignominy of playing second fiddle to a young American hero in a Back to the Future copy
The film adaptation of a hit musical from Alan Jay Lerner and Fredreick Loewe in which Gene Kelly discovers love in a village that exists outside of time in the Scottish highlands
A South Korean film that remakes The Caller about a girl who finds she can make phone calls across time to another woman only to find that the caller is a psychopath who begins to wreak havoc with her timeline
A horror version of Frequency where Rachelle Lefevre has phone conversations across time with a disturbed woman who then starts causing people to disappear and altering the timeline. Cleverly told and with some chilling twists
There have been a spate of killer clown films in the last few years almost none of which have escaped being cheap and crappy. This one is based around the real-life clown motel in Nevada
An experimental silent film from the great Rene Clair that depicts a group of people who remain unaffected as all of Paris around them has been frozen in time by a ray experiment
A B-budgeted film made not long after Close Encounters of the Third Kind about a family on a ranch encountering mysterious alien phenomena. An early Charles Band produced film
Amateur low-budget production about mysterious happenings in the aftermath of an alien invasion. This has many ideas but none of them much coalesce into a plot
Scott Derrickson acquits himself well taking on one of Marvel’s magician superhero. He replicates well the psychedelic esoterica that gained the comic book a cult following and Benedict Cumberbatch anchors the show perfectly
A thoroughly overrated cult classic. A baffling mixture of precognition, time travel, sinister talking bunnies and 1980s satire. What this doesn’t do is ever fall together into a coherent explanation about what is going on
Nominally a sequel to Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s first film Resolution, this concerns a strange cult but expands outwards to involve a mind-boggling array of backwoods timeloops and reality blurrings
A big-budget film that has one of the great SF premises – what if a modern aircraft carrier were transported back in time to the eve of Pearl Harbor – only to end up blowing it.
Not to be confused with Tod Browning’s shock classic, this starts with a mind-bending quality that leaves you wondering WTF is going on, before logically and ingeniously unfolding as a psychic powers film
Intelligent and well written film where freak weather conditions allow a son to communicate with his late father by radio across thirty years in time. Where the film starts to get interesting is when this creates unexpected changes in the present
One of the best of the Amicus horror anthologies. All of the episodes are strong, well cast and well directed. The third episode offers a particularly funny comic take on the exorcism film
Ben Wheatley produced film that soon becomes a first order mindfuck. An detective undercover in therapy could just be a mentally ill man with delusions of being a detective or just as equally be having his reality manipulated
Space opera made in the aftermath of Star Wars, a magpie collage of influences not always the most coherently presented and given a comic emphasis
Vincenzo Natali, the director of Cube, adapts a novella by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill about people becoming lost in a topographically and temporally shifting sea of grass
This could be Christopher Nolan’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he draws from in many respects, but where Kubrick was cold and oblique, this is a 2001 with a heart. A pleasure to see a film rooted in credible science and dealing with high concept SF
Lightweight and likeable Meg Ryan romcom in which she is romanced by a chivalrous and perfectly mannered Hugh Jackman travelled through time from the 19th Century
A low-budget modernised version of the Edgar Rice Burroughs book about a group ending up on a lost continent where dinosaurs still roam. Slightly better than usual for The Asylum
The sixth and last of the Sharknado films, this has the usual crew fighting sharknados throughout history with the recognition there is nowhere more ridiculous and over-the-top for the series to go
Palm Springs was one of the funniest and most delightful variants on the Groundhog Day timeloop theme. This is a French language remake that relocates the story to the Moroccan desert
Reminiscent of The Quiet Earth, this concerns a bus of people who end up in a deserted Hong Kong, The film seems unsure whether it is comedy or drama, while it creates an intriguing mystery about what is happening only to leave it unanswered in a frustratingly abrupt ending
Tim Burton used to be the great hope of fantastic cinema but his efforts since 2000 have been greeted with general disappointment. This Young Adult adaptation plays out like a fantasy version of the X-Men
DreamWorks animated film based on an old Rocky and Bullwinkle segment about a time-travelling genius dog and his adopted human son. This takes a relentlessly content-free approach to history that strips it down to no more than a series of giddy 3D slapstick gags for the single digit age groups
Disney film about a group of teens who find that heart of a UFO that opens up a time warp at their high school
About the ninth film version of Jules Verne’s desert island survival story. This doesn’t add the giant animals/insects other versions do, although we still get a number of wild sf elements the original book never had. Problem though is that the film never adds enough to make proceedings very interesting
Variation on the Groundhog Day timeloop theme, this has two people trapped on the same day at a wedding. Of all the copies, this is a delight that has a really hilariously madcap creativity
Based on a non-fiction, fringe science book that makes claims that the US Navy conducted experiments that turned a ship invisible during WWII, this spins the idea out into a modest time travel story
This Syfy Channel production can’t seem to decide if it is a sequel or a remake of the 1984 film. Michael Paré turn up in both versions but goes from being the hero to a menacing heavy. The original had its moments but this is generic and routine in all ways
Tim Burton’s much disliked remake. Certainly, the ape makeups are superb. While Burton touches many points with the original, he has dropped the biting satire in favour of adventure, while the ending left everyone scratching their heads
A wholly unnecessary sequel to Donnie Darko featuring the same bafflingly inexplicable time-blurring things happening to his sister
Cheap mockbuster from The Asylum that was designed to exploit the success of the flop Prince of Persia. While ostensibly a Sinbad film, this confusingly abandons the Arabian Nights milieu and is set contemporary where Sinbad is not sailor but a corporate CEO stranded on a desert island
One of a handful of prehistoric adventure films made by Hammer Studios. This eschews the stop-motion animated dinosaurs of their earlier One Million Years B.C. but does give the stage to Martine Beswick who injects a sizzling dose of sexuality and camps a silly plot up by playing to the hilt
Richard Kelly of Donnie Darko fame makes a work set in a near-future L.A., a sprawling film bursting at the edges with too many characters and subplots but not uninteresting
Comedy about a cop from the future who joins the present-day force where he is partnered with a cop thawed out from the 1960s. This is a premise that should have been funny but emerges as something like Sledge Hammer cast with the characters from Dumb and Dumber
Highly entertaining Japanese film about modern soldiers thrown back to feudal Japan and deciding to overthrow the shogunate
Unimaginative time travel/action film that plays out like
An impressive line-up of genre names came together for this big event mini-series that sets out to offer a conclusive explanation for the Bermuda Triangle in a plot that juggles an entertaining stew of wild ideas involving timewarps, alternate timelines and government cover-ups
Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, John Landis and George Miller came together to make this film homage to Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. The episodes are variable but the standout is Miller’s Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
Michiel Huisman is an air traffic controller who discovers that small inconsequential things are repeating themselves every day and that he is being drawn to reenact a fatal incident. A beautifully made film that arrives at an ending that leaves you scratching your head in puzzlement
Eli Roth-produced remake of the Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter film Two Thousand Maniacs, this plants tongue in cheek, is fairly and squarely aimed at a frat boy audience and unapologetic about piling on copious amounts of gore and naked breasts
Sequel to the outrageously gory 2001 Maniacs, although here the horror comedy balance spills over into absurd farce and cheap gore effects. Crucially, the film seems cheaper and less polished, more messy and random in terms of its arrangements
One of the better of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s cheap splatter films, set in a Confederate town that exists in a timewarp and slaughters all outsiders
Animated film based on the popular fantasy wargame. The set-up is a fascinating mix of SF and mediaeval religion but the plot rehashes Aliens without much payoff and the animation is B-budget
Takashi Miike conducts a live-action adaptation of a 1970s anime tv series with completely madcap results. The effect is like drowning in multi-coloured candyfloss flavoured with LSD
Makoto Shinkai is a rising name of acclaim in anime. This starts as a regular light and fluffy piece about a boy and a girl who keep waking up in each other’s bodies but then expands out into a wholly different story, gaining unexpected emotional depths as it does
Enjoyable sequel to Jumanji and actually a much superior film in the hands of Jon Favreau. This expands the idea of the Jumanji boardgame that brings things out from a jungle to life to a space theme